Conjunctive Function

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — For Tatsuya Fukushima, one word is worth at least 178 pages, which happens to be the length of his new book about the Japanese conjunction “ga.”

The book, Ga: Japanese Conjunction: Its Functions and Sociolinguistic Implications, examines how the word developed its current-day meaning, how it is used both in written and spoken form and how it is used on the World Wide Web, said Fukushima, a University of Arkansas professor of Japanese.

Fukushima began studying the word “ga” as a graduate student and has delved deeper into its meaning and usage since then.

“I developed a sense that there is a lot more to this word than originally thought,” he said. “The conjunction 'ga’ crystallizes various aspects of Japanese language, people, and culture in one syllable,” he concludes in his book.

Today, the word “ga” can take on five different meanings in a sentence, although its most common usage is as a conjunction that means “but” or “however.” Some grammarians believe it should only be used to mean “but; however,” while others believe it shouldn’t be used at all.

“It is used to highlight the semantic boundary between the sentence before 'ga’ and the sentence after 'ga,’” Fukushima said. In Japanese culture, “ga” can be used to reflect sensitivity to the needs of others, to create a sense of harmony and consensus within a group, Fukushima said.

Fukushima examines both the frequency of the use of “ga” and the distribution of its meanings in written and spoken language. To do this, he looked at several different sources of language — editorial and breaking news articles from a newspaper, the political speeches of prime ministers and discussions posted on Yahoo! Japan message boards.

“In newspaper editorials, 'ga’ was practically nonexistent,” Fukushima said. He pointed out that editorials in Japanese newspapers are always collective efforts, scrutinized by the entire editorial board. Breaking news stories, however, which are written by a reporter and rapidly edited, sometimes contained “ga.”

“That may be because they have to get the story out as quickly as possible, sometimes 'ga’ will slip out,” Fukushima said.

“Ga” seems more frequent in spoken language, but its frequency and meaning vary depending upon the speaker and his or her intentions. To learn more about the use of “ga” in spoken language, Fukushima studied the press conference speeches of three different prime ministers to evaluate their use of “ga.”

People who use “ga” infrequently with little variance in meaning tend to be more self-assertive, Fukushima contends. They also tend to use more “straight talk” in their speeches. In contrast, the ambiguous use of “ga” can be used to build consensus, but it also can be used to obscure the speaker’s own agenda, leaving it up to the listener to interpret the speaker’s meaning. Frequent users of “ga” who use the word to mean many different things have this orientation.

After his examination of the use of “ga” in newspaper writing and public speeches, Fukushima turned to the World Wide Web to examine the linguistics and sociology of the use of “ga” on the Internet. Some research suggests that the anonymity of the Web will induce inflammatory remarks, while other research contends that people will remain polite because they anticipate readers’ responses to their postings. To examine this issue, Fukushima studied the language in several conversations posted to Japanese message boards on Yahoo! Japan. The topics ranged from entertainment figures to national politics, from unemployment to baseball and favorite noodle restaurants.

He found moderate usage of “ga” with a wide distribution of meanings, showing that people were anticipating responses and were using “ga” to see how others would respond to their postings.

“Web discussions are interesting because there are features of both written and spoken language — it’s basically a hybrid,” he said.

In addition to examining the word’s current meanings and usages, Fukushima traces “ga” back through time, pinpointing the threshold of its current use to the so-called Insei-ki Era (1086-1192 A.D.). Before that time, “ga” was a subject marker, used to mark the preceding word as the subject of a sentence. Because it was used after the noun phrase of a complex sentence-like structure, it eventually took on a conjunctive function.

Ga: Japanese Conjunction: Its Functions and Sociolinguistic Implications is published by Lincom Europa. Fukushima is a professor in the department of foreign languages in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences.

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